Soon you’ll be able to pay for your utility bills and parking with Boost

Heard of Boost? For the uninitiated, it’s a homegrown mobile lifestyle e-wallet that lets you pay for dining, online purchases, game credits, digital subscriptions, and prepaid top-ups. It even lets you send and receive money from friends and family, and if you’re out dining, it has a feature to “Go Dutch” to split the bill. Now, things are going to get even better because soon, you’ll be able to pay your utility bills and parking with the Boost app on your phone.

Boost was launched in January 2017 and initially let prepaid users top up their mobile credit. Over a year on, it has grown to be so much more. In fact, it’s now the leading homegrown e-wallet app with over 2.5 million users, and has over 25,000 merchant touchpoints both online and offline.

The cool thing about Boost is its cashback mechanism. Each time you complete a transaction, you’ll be entitled to a “Shake Reward.” All you need to do is shake your phone and you’ll receive a random cash amount in your e-wallet. It can be MYR0.50, MYR1 or even MYR5!

Starting the middle of last year, Boost also introduced a way to buy digital vouchers from leading brands at great discounts from Boost’s partners. They range from game credits from Steam and Garena to e-commerce platforms like 11street and Lazada; on to F&B brands like Boost Juice, myBurgerlab; as well as digital subscriptions like Spotify and even MBO cinema vouchers.

The other awesome thing is the ability to send and receive money to one another without interbank charges.

New features

As mentioned, Boost is rolling out some new features which will expand its use cases even further. In about two weeks’ time, you’ll be able to pay for parking using your Boost e-wallet balance.

As you know, I’m a huge fan of KiplePark, a dedicated pay-for-parking app which completely eradicates the need for parking meters and parking machines. The downside is that KiplePark is only available in a handful of locations at the moment. With Boost joining the fray, it will help make penetration of cashless payment for parking more accessible, sooner.

In the first stage, Boost will focus on DBKL car parks in Kuala Lumpur, with the initiative kicking off sometime in July 2018.

Boost said at the media launch of its new features, that users will also be able to extend parking time via the app as well as receive notifications when parking time is close to expiring.

Another new feature is the ability to pay for utility bills such as Telekon Malaysia, Astro and Syabas, to name a few. When you pay for a bill, you’ll also get to enjoy shake rewards, as well as set auto-reminders.